bugs are going to hatch out of—”
“All right,” Richard said hastily.
10
The vending machines stank.
It looked to Jack as if all the stuff inside them had spoiled.
Blue mould coated the cheese crackers and Doritos and Jax
and fried pork-rinds. Sluggish creeks of melted ice cream
were oozing out of the panels in the front of the Hav-a-Kone machine.
Jack pulled Richard toward the window. He looked out.
From here Jack could make out The Depot quite well. Beyond
it he could see the chain-link fence and the service road leading off-campus.
“We’ll be out in a few seconds,” Jack whispered back. He
unlocked the window and ran it up.
This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possi-
bilities . . . do you see the possibilities, Jack-O?
He thought maybe he did.
“Are there any of those people out there?” Richard asked
nervously.
“No,” Jack said, taking only the most cursory of glances. It didn’t really matter if there were or not, anymore.
One of the three or four biggest American railheads . . . a fortune in rail shippage . . . mostly to the west coast . . . he was the first one to see the potential in shipping west . . .
west . . . west . . .
A thick, mucky mixture of tidal-flat aroma and garbage
stench drifted in the window. Jack threw one leg over the sill and grabbed for Richard’s hand. “Come on,” he said.
Richard drew back, his face long and miserable with
fright.
“Jack . . . I don’t know . . .”
“The place is falling apart,” Jack said, “and pretty soon it’s going to be crawling with bugs as well. Now come on. Someone’s going to see me sitting here in this window and we’ll lose our chance to scurry out of here like a couple of mice.”
“I don’t understand any of this!” Richard wailed. “I don’t
understand what in the goddam hell is going on here!”
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A Collision of Worlds
479
“Shut up and come on,” Jack said. “Or I will leave you,
Richard. Swear to God I will. I love you, but my mother is dying. I’ll leave you to fend for yourself.”
Richard looked at Jack’s face and saw—even without his
glasses—that Jack was telling the truth. He took Jack’s hand.
“God, I’m scared,” he whispered.
“Join the club,” Jack said, and pushed him off. His feet hit the mucky lawn a second later. Richard jumped down beside him.
“We’re going to cross to The Depot,” Jack whispered. “I
make it about fifty yards. We’ll go in if it’s unlocked, try to hide as well as we can on the Nelson House side of it if it isn’t. Once we’re sure no one’s seen us and the place is still quiet—”
“We go for the fence.”
“Right.” Or maybe we’ll have to flip, but never mind that
just now. “The service road. I’ve got an idea that if we can get off the Thayer grounds, everything will be okay again. Once we get a quarter of a mile down the road, you may look back over your shoulder and see the lights in the dorms and the library just as usual, Richard.”
“That’d be so great,” Richard said with a wistfulness that was heartbreaking.
“Okay, you ready?”
“I guess so,” Richard said.
“Run to The Depot. Freeze against the wall on this side.
Low, so those bushes screen you. See them?”
“Yes.”
“Okay . . . go for it!”
They broke away from Nelson House and ran for The De-
pot side by side.
11
They were less than halfway there, breath puffing out of their mouths in clear white vapor, feet pounding the mucky
ground, when the bells in the chapel broke into a hideous,
grinding jangle of sound. A howling chorus of dogs answered the bells.
They were back, all these were-prefects. Jack groped for
Richard and found Richard groping for him. Their hands
linked together.
Page 480
480
THE TALISMAN
Richard screamed and tried to pull him off to the left. His hand tightened down on Jack’s until the fingerbones grated together paralyzingly. A lean white wolf, a Board Chairman of Wolves, came around The Depot and was now racing toward
them. That was the old man from the limousine, Jack thought.
Other wolves and dogs followed . . . and then Jack realized with sick surety that some of them were not dogs; some of
them were half-transformed boys, some grown men—
teachers, he supposed.
“Mr Dufrey!” Richard shrieked, pointing with his free hand ( Gee, you see pretty well for someone who’s lost his glasses, Richie-boy, Jack thought crazily). “Mr. Dufrey! Oh God, it’s Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Dufrey!”
So Jack got his first and only look at Thayer School’s headmaster—a tiny old man with gray hair, a big, bent nose, and the wizened, hairy body of an organ grinder’s monkey. He ran swiftly along on all fours with the dogs and the boys, a mor-tarboard bobbing crazily up and down on his head and some-
how refusing to fall off. He grinned at Jack and Richard, and his tongue, long and lolling and stained yellow with nicotine, fell out through the middle of his grin.
“Mr. Dufrey! Oh God! Oh dear God! Mr. Dufrey! Mr.
Du—”
He was yanking Jack harder and harder toward the left.
Jack was bigger, but Richard was in the grip of panic. Explosions rocked the air. That foul, garbagey smell grew thicker and thicker. Jack could hear the soft flupping and plupping of mud squeezing out of the earth. The white wolf which led the pack was closing the distance and Richard was trying to pull them away from it, trying to pull them toward the fence, and that was right, but it was wrong, too, it was wrong because it was The Depot they had to get to, not the fence. That was the spot, that was the spot because this had been one of the three or four biggest American railheads, because Andrew Thayer
had been the first one to see the potential in shipping west, because Andrew Thayer had seen the potential and now he, Jack Sawyer, saw the potential, as well. All of this was of course only intuition, but Jack had come to believe that, in these universal matters, his intuition was the only thing he could trust.
“Let go of your passenger, Sloat!” Dufrey was gobbling.
“Let go of your passenger, he’s too pretty for you!”
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A Collision of Worlds
481
But what’s a passenger? Jack thought in those last few seconds, as Richard tried blindly to pull them off-course and
Jack yanked him back on, toward the mixed bunch of mon-
grels and boys and teachers that ran behind the big white
wolf, toward The Depot. I’ll tell you what a passenger is; a passenger is one who rides. And where does a passenger begin to ride? Why, at a depot . . .
“Jack, it’ll bite!” Richard screamed.
The wolf outran Dufrey and leaped at them, its jaws drop-
ping open like a loaded trap. From behind them there was a
thick, crunching thud as Nelson House split open like a rotten cantaloupe.
Now it was Jack who was bearing down on Richard’s fin-
gerbones, clamping tight and tighter and tightest as the night rang with crazy bells and flared with gasoline bombs and rattled with firecrackers.
“Hold on!” he screamed. “Hold on, Richard, here we go!”
He had time to think: Now the shoe is on the other foot; now it’s Richard who is the herd, who is my passenger. God help us both.
“Jack, what’s happening?” Richard shrieked. “What are you doing? Stop it! STOP IT! STOP—”
Richard was still shrieking, but Jack no longer heard
him—suddenly, triumphantly, that feeling of creeping doom
cracked open like a black egg and his brain filled up with
light—light and a sweet purity of air; air so pure that you could smell the radish a man pulled out of his garden half a mile away. Suddenly Jack felt as if he could simply push off and jump all the way across the quad . . . or fly, like those men with the wings strapped to their backs.
Oh, there was light and clear air replacing that foul,
garbagey stench and a sensation of crossing voids of dark-
ness, and for a moment everything in him seemed clear and
full of radiance; for a moment everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.
So Jack Sawyer flipped into the Territories again, this time while running headlong across the degenerating Thayer campus, with the sound of cracked bells and snarling dogs filling the air.
And this time he dragged Morgan Sloat’s son Richard with
him.
Page 482
Interlude
Sloat in This World/Orris in the
Territories (III)
Shortly after seven a.m. on the morning following Jack and
Richard’s flip out from Thayer, Morgan Sloat drew up to the curb just outside the main gates of Thayer School. He parked.